COUNTRY MUSIC REVIEW; After Love and Frivolity, A Penance of War Songs

By KELEFA SANNEH

Published: July 26, 2005

Lots of people know someone whose life has been transformed by the military: made bigger, stronger, more purposeful. Well, something similar happens at a concert by Toby Keith, the multimillion-selling country star.

Mr. Keith excels at the sort of bobbing and weaving that turns singers into pop stars; he knows how to smooth out his roughest lyrics (with a wry smile, or with nimble change of direction) and how to rough up the smoothest ones, too. In ''I'm Just Talkin' About Tonight,'' he imagined a woman's overeager proposition: ''She said, 'I'm a lady looking for a man in my life/ Who will make a good husband. I'll make a good wife.''' Then the music came to a halt so that Mr. Keith could put her off with a chuckling rejoinder: ''Heh-heh-heh. Easy now.''

That song was released on an album called ''Pull My Chain,'' which went into the stores two weeks before 9/11. And in the months and years after the attack, Mr. Keith has found a different way to thrill his fans, channeling their enthusiasm for America and the American military. When he sang ''American Soldier'' and ''The Taliban Song'' and ''Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American),'' the crowd got exponentially louder and more passionate, and the man onstage seemed to transform from an ordinary pop star to a righteous hero.

Mr. Keith's new album is ''Honky Tonk University'' (Dreamworks Nashville), a low-key and often lovable album full of wry, sometimes melancholy songs about women. War appears only in passing, when he reminds us that he often performs for the troops: ''I like to get down with my boys in Afghanistan and Baghdad City, too.'' Not coincidentally, he only played two songs from the new album; this crowd hoped to be shaken and stirred, not just serenaded.

That's precisely the lesson learned by Mr. Keith's opening act, Lee Ann Womack, whose elegant set earned applause but not excitement. Her biggest recent hit is ''I May Hate Myself in the Morning,'' a regretful song about a night of passion that hasn't happened yet; the chorus continues, ''But I'm gonna love you tonight.'' She sang a brave, understated version, letting her voice get quiet and reserved to match the mixed emotions of the lyrics.

By contrast, Mr. Keith was determined to give the audience a big, flashy, rock 'n' roll-inspired show, though he certainly doesn't move like a rock star, or sound like one. (He has a deep, sturdy voice and a no-frills approach to singing.) So Mr. Keith mainly stood or walked with his acoustic guitar, letting his songs do the running and jumping.

In all the hits Mr. Keith played (and they were virtually all hits), you could hear the sound of a star finding subtle and unsubtle ways to fine-tune his persona. One of Mr. Keith's most popular nonwar songs is ''Whiskey Girl,'' an unreasonably addictive singalong about a woman who drinks like one of the guys; it's a macho tribute to the feminine.

Righteousness and roguishness are the two main currents in Mr. Keith's music, but he goes one step further in ''Beer for My Horses,'' which might be the most startling song in his catalog. The lyrics fondly recall a time when crime-fighting was more straightforward: ''Take all the rope in Texas/ Find a tall oak tree, round up all of them bad boys.'' To underscore the point, the song was accompanied by a video that included an old black-and-white photograph of a hanged body dangling from a tree.

Things got a bit simpler when it was time to salute the troops. Early on, Mr. Keith spied a few soldiers in uniform in the front row, and the night's most moving moment came when a camera displayed their tearful reaction to the audience's long ovation for them.

When he returned, inevitably, to war songs at the end of the night, they had come to seem like penance for all the frivolity that had come before. ''There's a lot of men dead/ So we can sleep in peace at night, when we lay down our head,'' he sang, and behind the awkward syntax (that's one big head!), you could hear not just pride but a dash of guilt, too: an implicit acknowledgment that no amount of tribute songs or U.S.O. tours can close the gap between entertainer and soldier.

Photo: Toby Keith at the PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel, N.J. (Photo by Norman Y. Lono for The New York Times)